


parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

by gdgdbaby



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Cooking, Families of Choice, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 03:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5523149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gdgdbaby/pseuds/gdgdbaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The safe house smells like basil when Gaby returns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bonster/gifts).



> or: gaby teller and her two house husbands.

The safe house smells like basil when Gaby returns. Smoke still clings to her clothing like a second skin; tonight was just simple recon, the long sit-and-wait type, but factories harboring explosives always invariably smell the same. It's good to come back to something warmer.

Cooking isn't a skill Gaby ever picked up, but she remembers her father swinging three different saucepans around when she was little, barely tall enough to see above the counter. He said it was like chemistry, an exact science. Given all the right ingredients, you could make something new from them, something more than the sum of its parts. In that way, it wasn't so different from anything else Gaby knew. Even if she couldn't use the herbs and spices for years after, she could name them, tell you their properties: the mintiness of rosemary, the distinct smell of cumin on lamb, the way basil sank into soup and curled around your tongue with every sip.

"What's for breakfast?" she asks, poking her head into the kitchen. The pan on the stove is sizzling, and Napoleon's chopping something leafy and green. Coriander, maybe, or parsley. His apron is coming loose around his waist, and his hair is doing that thing it does when he doesn't put anything in it, flopping over into his eyes. He leans over to dump the parsley into the pan. "Did you ask before taking that?"

The grin on Napoleon's face tells her everything she needs to know. He does like living dangerously.

Gaby rolls her eyes and steps away toward the bathroom. The shower she takes is quick, perfunctory, just enough to wash the last of the cloying industrial smell of metal out of her hair. She wrings the water out in front of the fogged up mirror, but it's still mostly wet when she slides out onto the balcony.

Illya glances up from where he's watering his chives. He's a little more put-together than Napoleon is in the mornings, but there are creases in his rumpled shirt, his feet are bare against the wooden slats of the floor, and his hair's sticking up a little in the back. "You're going to catch cold," he offers.

"Mm," she says, leaning against the railing. Her bangs drip down into the street. "The sun is going to be coming up soon enough."

It was kind of Waverly to send them to Prague in June. The weather is gorgeous, greenery lush, and the safe house is quaint and lovely, tucked into a quiet part of the city. Illya hadn't shown any outward signs of excitement when he saw the balcony, but the morning after they moved in, his meticulously cultivated rows of bulbous spring onion and garlic had already been set out in the sun.

Light creeps up slowly over the horizon, bleeds into the crevices of the cobblestone below and across the painted rooftops. In Berlin, Gaby never really got to see the sunrise, late to bed and late to rise, but her timetable is much different now. To her right, Illya folds a big hand across his forehead to watch as well, chives forgotten.

"Food's ready," she hears Napoleon yell from the kitchen. She turns on her heel, tugs on a drying curl of her hair, and pads back into the house.

Napoleon once told her cooking was like art; they were in Milan, infiltrating a drug trafficking ring—or, rather, the tea distribution front of a drug trafficking ring—and Illya had just begun his gardening experiment. "Red Peril has a green thumb? Who would have guessed?" Illya sprayed the hose at him instead of the vines, and Gaby saw the ghost of a smile cross his face when Napoleon yelped and ducked away. Cooking was like art, Napoleon said, because you could do anything you wanted with it. You weren't held to strict, fast rules; you could change things up exactly how you liked, make something completely new. Sometimes it looked good and sometimes it looked fucking terrible, but the heart of it was the most important part.

"I thought how it tasted was the most important part," Gaby said, and laughed at the face Napoleon made.

Napoleon likes cooking, is the thing. He twisted his ankle in a bad fall some months ago in Helsinki, was side-lined from gritty mission work for a fortnight, at least, and every evening over the next two weeks Gaby and Illya would come home to some new concoction. For three days all they ate was aubergine—baked, boiled, roasted, stir-fried—until Illya finally put his foot down and brought home some actual meat. It's entirely possible Illya only picked up gardening in an effort to steer some of Napoleon's manic energy in a meaningful way, but Gaby isn't complaining. They all have their coping mechanisms.

Breakfast is omelettes today, the most elaborate Gaby has ever eaten, plated beautifully as always. Illya stares down, fork clenched in his hand. "That was my parsley," he says darkly, but he still digs in anyway, and Napoleon rests his palm on his chin, smiles as he eats. There's a reason, Gaby thinks, that everything Illya plants is an edible, things easily grown and used in the dishes Napoleon likes to make most. Illya wouldn't be doing it unless they were supposed to be eaten. He isn't very subtle.

They haven't been here for very long, barely even a week, but this routine is one of many that was established long before: Napoleon makes breakfast, Illya and Gaby eat it, and then Gaby passes out after a long night of reconnaissance. Their mission here is strict retrieval, as little real combat as necessary, but knowing the nature of the beast means they have to be prepared for anything. Gaby needs her rest.

She's visibly flagging by the time she's finished eating, fork clattering onto her plate, and Napoleon scoops everything out from beneath her chin, dumps it all into the sink. "Go sleep," he says. "Peril will wash the dishes." Illya makes a noise of protest, but it's faint. Lip service, by now. When Gaby smiles, fond and sleepy, Illya smiles back.

"Alright," Gaby says, and goes.


End file.
